The bride wore black Read Free

composer), and nuance.
    In The Cinema of Francois Truffaut (1970) Graham Petrie writes eloquently of this movie's power. He describes how Truffaut obtains the effect "almost literally ... of a dance in which music and camera combine, the one adapting and suiting itself to the needs of the other." He discusses the made-for-each-other relationship between the bride and her victims, with Juhe "using [the men] coldly and deliberately for her own purposes" while they in turn ironically "attempt to manipulate her for their own satisfaction." He praises Truffaut for pulling our sympathies in several directions at once so that "we find ourselves drawn into complicity with [Julie], into shar-
    ing her sense of her victims as pure objects to be manipulated and disposed of at the same time as we are made uncomfortably aware of their reality and humanity. One side of us wishes her to succeed . . . while another keeps reminding us that not only as these people like ourselves who are being killed but their elimination is fanatically wrong-headed."
    While preparing his book on Truffaut, Petrie read The Bride Wore Black and disliked it intensely. He found Woolrich's milieu and characters "uniformly unsympathetic," the language and motivation "crude and coarse," and criticized Woolrich for making "no attempt to humanise or give complexity to any of the victims," who are all "one-dimensional figures put up simply to be knocked down as ingeniously as possible. . . . The sordid and mechanical 'naturalism' of the book fails to bring any of the characters or events to life in any very challenging way, while Truffaut's romanticism and the mysterious and dreamlike atmosphere which he creates combine with his typical attention to the details of human experience to produce a work of complex and evocative beauty, for whose subtleties the original can take little credit." In short, Petrie seems blind to how much of the plot and the essence of the film originate in Woolrich's novel, and argues with a wrong-headedness comparable to Julie's that Truffaut made a silk purse out of a sow's ear when the more balanced view would seem to be that he made a silk purse out of a piece of silk.
    What Woolrich thought of the movie will never be known. He was still alive when it opened in New York in July 1968 but was confined to a wheelchair and unable or unwilling to make the effort to go see it. Less than three months later he was dead.
    In a fragment found among his papers after he was gone, Woolrich explained why he wrote as he did. "I was only trying to cheat death," he said. "I was only trying to
    INTRODUCTION XVll
    surmount for a little while the darkness that all my life I surely knew was going to come rolling in on me some day and obliterate me." In the end, of course, he had to die, as we all do. But as long as there are readers to be haunted by the fruit of his life, by the way he took his wretched psychological environment and his sense of entrapment and loneliness and turned them into poetry of the shadows, the world that Woolrich imagined lives.
    Part One
    BLISS
    Blue moon, you saw me standing alone,
    Without a dream in my heart, without a love of my own.
    Blue moon, you knew just what I was there for....
    Rodgers and Hart
    THE WOMAN
    J
    ULIE, MY JULIE." IT followed the woman down the four flights of the stairwell. It was the softest whisper, the strongest claim, that human lips can utter. It did not make her falter, lose a step. Her face was white when she came out into the daylight, that was all.
    The girl waiting by the valise at the street entrance turned and looked at her almost incredulously as she joined her, as though wondering where she had found the fortitude to go through with it. The woman seemed to read her thoughts; she answered the unspoken question, "it was just as hard for me to say goodbye as for them, only I was used to it, they weren't. I had so many long nights in which to steel myself. They only went through it once; I've had to go